KEEPING THOSE WORDS IN MIND

Linguist and cognitive psychologist Max Louwerse, PhD. argues that understanding language is not just possible because of memory, brains, environment and computation, but because of the patterns in the sequence of sounds and words themselves.He demonstrates that what seems to be an arbitrary communication system, with arbitrary characters and sounds that become words, and arbitrary meanings for those words, actually is a well-organized system that has evolved over tens of thousands of years to make communication as efficient as it is. What is needed for humans to acquire language, is for humans to recognize and discover the patterns in our communication system.

Max Louwerse, PhD., is a linguist, a cognitive psychologist, and an artificial intelligence researcher. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and became full professor in Psychology and Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis, where he also directed the interdisciplinary Institute for Intelligent Systems.

By examining how our brains process language and find patterns, the intricacies of the language system itself, and even scientific breakthroughs in computer science and artificial intelligence, Keeping Those Words in Mind brings a brand new and interdisciplinary explanation for our ability to extract meaning from language.